Читать книгу Christmas Kisses with My Cowboy - Kate Pearce - Страница 7

Chapter One

He had a first name, but they all called him by his last name: Parker. He was part Crow. In fact, he had an aunt and uncle who still lived on the reservation. His parents had divorced when he was young. His mother was long dead, even before he went overseas in the military. He didn’t know, or care, where his father was.

He worked on a huge ranch owned by J.L. Denton, near Benton, Colorado. He was the world’s best horse wrangler, to hear J.L. tell it. Of course, J.L. had been known to exaggerate.

It was autumn and the last lot of yearlings had gone to market. The bulls were in winter pasture. The cows were in pastures close to the ranch so that they could be taken care of when snow started falling. That would be pretty soon, in the Colorado mountains, because it was late October, almost Halloween.

All the hands had to do checks on the cattle at least two or three times a day; more on the pregnant cows, especially on the pregnant heifers, the first-time mothers. Calves dropped in April. The pregnant cows and heifers had been bred the last of July for an April birthing date, and there were a lot of pregnant female cattle on the ranch.

Calves were the soul of the operation. J.L. ran purebred Black Angus, and he made good money when he sold off the calf crop every year. Not that he needed money so much. He was a multimillionaire, mostly from gas and oil and mining. The ranch was just cream on top of his other investments. He loved cattle. So did his new wife, who wrote for a famous sword and sorcery television series called Warriors and Warlocks that even Parker watched on pay-per-view. It was fun trying to wheedle details out of the new Mrs. Denton. However, even though she was a kind, sweet woman, she never gave away a single bit of information about the series. Never.

Parker lived in a line cabin away from the ranch house, where he broke horses for J.L. for the remuda, the string of horses each cowboy had to keep for ranch work. Horses tired, so they had to be switched often on a working ranch, especially during high-stress periods. He was good with all sorts of livestock, but he loved horses. He was blessed in the sense that horses also loved him, even outlaw horses. He’d had the touch since he was in grammar school on the Crow reservation up at Crow Agency, near the Little Bighorn Battleground at Hardin, Montana. His mother had encouraged him, emphasizing that sensitivity wasn’t a bad thing in a man. His father said just the opposite.

Parker remembered his father with anger. He’d married Parker’s mother, Gray Dove, in a moment of weakness, or so he’d said. But he had no plans to live on a reservation with her. So she went with him to his job in California until their son, Parker, was born. She and the child seemed to be an ongoing embarrassment to Chadwick Parker. He never stopped chiding his wife about her stupid ceremonies and superstitions. Finally, when Parker was six, she gave up and went back to Montana. It would have been nice if Parker’s father had missed her and wanted her back. He didn’t. He filed for divorce. Parker had never heard from him again. He doubted if the man even knew who he was. But it didn’t matter. One of Gray Dove’s brothers had taken him in when she died prematurely of pneumonia. He was part of a family, then, but still an outsider, even so. He fell in with a local gang in his teens and barely escaped prison by going into the military. Once there, he enjoyed the routine and found himself blessed with the same intelligence his absent father had. He was a mathematical genius. He aced any math courses he took, even trig and calculus and Boolean algebra.

Those skills after he graduated, with a degree in physics, served him well with government work. He didn’t advertise the degree around Benton. It suited him to have people think he was simply a horse wrangler.

Parker had found work on J.L. Denton’s ranch fresh out of the army, through an army buddy who’d been with him overseas in the Middle East. He had a knack for breaking horses without using anything except soft words and gentle hands. Word got around about how good he was at it, that he could do the job in a minimum of time and without injuring the animal in any way. He got job offers all the time, but he admired J.L. and had no plans to leave him.

He had a first cousin, Robert, in the home he’d been given after his mother’s death. He kept a careful eye on the boy and made sure he had enough money for school and athletics on the rez. Robert graduated from high school and also went into the military. He was now a petty officer aboard a navy ship somewhere in the Atlantic. He wrote home, but not often. Parker often got the feeling that his cousin was ashamed of his poverty-stricken beginnings and didn’t advertise them to people. It broke his parents’ hearts that the boy didn’t come to visit when he was on shore leave. But they adapted. People did, when they had to.

Money was never a worry for Parker. He had more than enough these days, now that his cousin had become self-supporting. He did send money to his cousin’s parents. His aunt and uncle had been kind to him, and they’d had his cousin late in life. They weren’t old, but they were middle-aged and Robert’s father was disabled. Parker helped out.

Parker didn’t drink, smoke, or gamble and he didn’t have much to do with women these days. So money wasn’t a problem. Not anymore.

He did like the occasional cigar. It wouldn’t appear obvious to an outsider, but Parker had a mind like a supercomputer. He could break any code, hack his way into any high-level computer that he liked, and get out without detection. It was a very valuable skill. His degree in astrophysics didn’t hurt, either, but it was his math skills that set him apart in intelligence work. So from time to time, men in suits riding in black sedans pulled up at the cabin and tried to coax him out of Colorado.

Finally, he’d accepted an assignment, for a whole summer. The amount they paid him had raised his eyebrows almost to his hairline. Even after paying taxes, the cash left over was more than enough to invest in stocks and bonds and make him a tidy nest egg for the future.

That one summer led to other summers, and top secret clearance, so that now he could have afforded to retire to some nice island and laze in the sun and drink piña coladas for the rest of his life. But he didn’t like liquor and he wasn’t partial to beaches. So he gentled horses and waited for the next black sedan to show up. There was never a lack of them.

He was thirty-two and he longed for a home and a family. But he didn’t have many friends left on the rez. Most of the girls he’d gone to school with were long married, with lots of children. His best friend had died of a drug overdose, leaving behind two children and a wife who lived in the same condition that had caused his friend’s death. He’d tried to get help for her, but she’d gone out of the rehab center the day after he got her in and she never looked back.

Life on the rez was hard. Really hard. They gave all this aid to foreign countries, spent all this money, making horrible weapons that could never be used in a civilized world, while little kids grew up in hopeless poverty and died too young. The big problem with the rez was the lack of job opportunities. What a pity that those entrepreneurs didn’t set up low-impact manufacturing plants on the rez, to make jobs for people who faced driving hours to even find one. They could have offered jobs making exclusive clothing or unique dolls; they could have made jobs creating prefab houses and easily-set-up outbuildings; they could have opened a business that would make sails for boats, or wind chimes, or furniture. There must be a thousand things that people could manufacture on the reservation if someone would just create the means. Craftsmanship was so rare that it was worth diamonds in the modern world. It was almost impossible to find anything made by hand, except for quilts and handcrafted items. Well, there were those beautiful things that the Amish made, he amended. He had Amish-built furniture in his cabin, provided by a small community of them nearby, from whom he also bought fresh butter and cheese and milk. Now there, he thought, was a true pioneering spirit. If the lights ever went out for good, the Amish wouldn’t have to struggle to survive.

* * *

Parker had been running one of J.L.’s new fillies through her paces while he pondered the problems of the world, and was just putting her up, when he heard fast hoofbeats and a young, winded voice yelling.

He moved away from the corral at the back of the big line cabin where he lived most of the year and looked out front. A palomino was galloping hell for leather down the trail. A youngster in boots and jeans and a long-sleeved flannel shirt and a floppy ranch hat, obviously chasing the horse, was stopped in the dirt road, bending over as if trying to catch his breath.

He kept his usual foul language to himself, not wanting to unsettle the young boy, who looked frantic enough already.

“Hey,” Parker called. “What’s going on?”

“My . . . horse!” came a high-pitched wail from the bent-over youngster. She stood up and a wealth of blond hair fell out of her hat. It wasn’t a boy after all. She sat down on the ground. She was crying. “She’ll make me give him back,” she sobbed. “She’ll never let me keep him. He knocked over part of the fence. She was calling the vet when he ran away and I was afraid . . . he’d hurt . . . himself!”

“Wait a bit.” He went down on one knee in front of her. “Just breathe,” he said gently. “Come on. Take it easy. Your horse won’t go far. We’ll follow him with a bucket of oats in a minute and he’ll come back.”

She looked up with china blue eyes in a thin face. “Really?” she asked hopefully.

He smiled. “Really.”

She studied him with real interest. She must have been nine or ten, just a kid. Her eyes were on his thick black hair, in a rawhide-tied ponytail at his back, framing a face with black eyes and thick eyebrows and a straight, aristocratic nose. “Are you Indian . . . I mean, Native American?” she asked, fascinated.

He chuckled. “Half of me is Crow. The rest is Scots.”

“Oh.”

“I’m Parker. Who are you?”

“I’m Teddie. Teddie Blake. My mom lives over that way. We moved here about four months ago.” She made a face. “I don’t know anybody. It’s a new school and I don’t get along well with most people.”

“Me, neither,” he confessed.

Her eyes lit up. “Really?”

He chuckled. “Really. It’s not so bad, the town of Benton. I’ve lived here for a while. You’ll love it, once you get used to it. The palomino’s yours?” he added, nodding toward where the horse had run.

“Yes. He was a rescue. We live on a small ranch. It was my grandmother’s. She left it to my dad when she died. That was six months ago, just before he . . .” She made a face. “Mom’s a teacher. She just started at Benton Elementary School. I’m in fifth grade there. The ranch has a barn and a fenced lot, and they were going to kill him. The palomino. He hurt his owner real bad. The vet was out at our place to doctor Mom’s horse and he told us. I begged Mom to let me have him. He won’t like it,” she added with a sour face.

“He?”

“Mom’s would-be boyfriend from back East,” she said miserably. “He works for a law firm in Washington, D.C. He wears suits and goes to the gym and hates meat.”

“Oh.” He didn’t say anything more.

She glanced at his stony face and didn’t see any reaction at all. He’d long since learned to hide his feelings.

“Anyway, he says he’s going to come out and visit next month. Unless maybe he gets lost in a blizzard or captured by Martians or something.”

He chuckled. “Don’t sound so hopeful. He might be nice.”

“He’s nice when Mom’s around,” she muttered.

His face hardened. “Is he, now?”

She saw the expression. He wasn’t hiding it. “Oh, no, he doesn’t . . . well, he’s just mean, that’s all. He doesn’t like me. He says it’s a shame that Mom has me, because he doesn’t want to raise someone else’s child.”

“Are your parents divorced?”

She shook her head. “My daddy’s dead. He was in the army. A bomb exploded overseas and he was killed. He was a doctor,” she added, fighting tears.

“How long ago?” he asked, and his voice softened.

“Six months. It’s why Mom wanted to move here, to get away from the memories. My grandmother left us the ranch. She was from here. That lawyer helped Mom get Daddy’s affairs straight and he’s really sweet on her. I don’t think she likes him that much. He wanted to take her out and she wouldn’t go. He’s just per . . . per . . .”

“Persistent?”

She nodded. “That.”

“Well, we all have our problems,” he returned.

There was a sound of hoofbeats. They turned and there was the palomino, galloping back toward them.

“Wait here a sec. Don’t go toward him,” he added. “It’s a him?”

“It’s a him.”

“Be right back.”

He went to the stable and got a sack of oats. The palomino was standing in the road, and the girl, Teddie, was right where he’d left her. Good girl, he thought, she wasn’t headstrong and she could follow orders.

“Look here, old fellow,” Parker said, standing beside the dirt road. He rattled the feed bag.

The palomino shook his head, raised his ears, and hesitated. But after a minute, he trotted right to Parker.

“Pretty old creature,” Parker said gently. He didn’t look the horse in the eyes, which might have seemed threatening to the animal. He held a hand, very slowly, to the horse’s nostrils. The horse sniffed and moved closer, rubbing his head against Parker’s. “Have some oats.”

“Gosh, I couldn’t get near him!” Teddie said, impressed.

He chuckled. “I break horses for J.L. Denton. He owns the ranch,” he added, indicating the sweep of land to the mountains with his head.

Parker smoothed the horse’s muzzle. “Let’s see.” He eased back the horse’s lip and nodded. “About fifteen, unless I miss my guess.”

“Fifteen?” she asked.

“Years old,” he said.

“I thought he was only a year or so!”

He shook his head. He hung the feed bag over the horse’s head and smoothed his hand alongside him, all the way to the back.

“You know about horses?” he asked Teddie.

She shook her head. “I’m trying to learn. Mom knows a lot, but she doesn’t have time. There are these YouTube videos. . . .”

“You never walk behind a horse unless you let him know you’re going to be there,” he explained as he smoothed his way down the horse’s flank to his tail. “Horses have eyes set on the sides of their heads. They’re prey animals, not predators. Their first instinct is always going to be flight. As such, they’re touchy and sensitive to sound and movement. They can see almost all the way around them, except to their hindquarters. So you have to be careful. You can get kicked if you don’t pay attention.”

“Nobody said that on the video I watched,” she confessed.

“You need some books,” he said. “And some DVDs.”

She sighed. “Mom said I didn’t know what I was doing. He was such a pretty horse and I didn’t want them to put him down. They arrested his owner.”

Parker just nodded. He was seeing some damage on the horse’s back, some deep scars. There was a cut that hadn’t healed near his tail, and two or three that had on his legs. “Somebody’s abused this horse,” he said coldly. “Badly. He’s got scars.”

“They said the man took a whip to him.” She grimaced. “They told me not to touch him on his front leg, but I was trying to look at his hoof and I forgot.”

“His hoof?”

“He was favoring that one.” She pointed to it.

He patted the horse’s shoulder, bent, and pulled up the horse’s hoof. He grimaced. “Good God!”

She looked, too, but she didn’t see anything. “What is it?”

“His hooves are in really bad shape. Has a vet seen him?”

“I don’t know. The animal control man brought him to the ranch for us. Mom was calling to get the vet, even before he knocked part of the fence down and ran away. She’s going to be really mad.”

Parker noted that the horse had no saddle on. “You didn’t try to ride him bareback, did you?” he asked.

She grimaced. “Mister, I don’t even know how to put a saddle on him. I sure can’t ride him. I’ve never ridden a horse.”

His black eyes widened. “You don’t know how to ride?”

“Well, Mom does,” she said hesitantly. “She grew up on a ranch in Montana. That’s where she met my daddy. She can ride most anything, but she’s been on the phone all day trying to get the movers to find a missing box. They think it went back East somewhere, but they haven’t done much about finding it. It had a lot of Daddy’s things. Mom’s furious.”

He shook his head. “That’s tough.”

“She said we’ll . . . uh-oh,” she added as a small SUV came down the road, pulled in very slowly next to the man and the child and the horse, and stopped.

“Who’s that?” Parker asked.

“Mom,” Teddie said, grimacing.

A blond woman wearing jeans and a black T-shirt got out of the SUV. “So there you are,” she said in an exasperated tone.

“Sorry, Mom,” Teddie said, wincing. “Bartholomew ran away and I ran after him. . . .”

“Bartholomew?” Parker asked.

“Well, he needed a fancy name. He’s so pretty. Handsome.” Teddie cleared her throat. “He did.”

“He broke through a fence. I was on the phone trying to find a vet who’ll come out and look at him, and when I went out to tell you what I found out, the horse was gone and so were you!”

“I was afraid he’d run in the road and get hurt,” Teddie said defensively.

China blue eyes looked up at Parker. “Oats, huh?” she asked as she saw the feed bag over the horse’s muzzle.

He nodded. “Quickest way to catch a runaway horse, if he has a sense of smell,” he added with a faint smile.

“She’s Katy,” Teddie introduced. “I don’t remember who you are,” she added with a shy smile at the tall man with the long black ponytail.

“Parker,” he said. He didn’t offer any more information, and he reached out to shake hands.

“You work for Mr. Denton, don’t you?” Katy asked, and her expression told him that she’d heard other things about him as well.

“I do. I’m his horse wrangler.”

She drew in a long breath. “Teddie, you never leave the house without telling me where you’re going.”

“Sorry, Mom.”

“And obviously the horse doesn’t need a vet immediately, or he wouldn’t have gotten this far!”

“You know about horses, do you?” Parker asked her.

She nodded.

“Come here.” He smoothed down the horse’s leg and pulled up the hoof. “Have a look.”

“Dear God,” she whispered reverently.

“If they lock his owner up forever, it won’t be long enough,” he added, putting the hoof back down. “There are deep cuts on his hindquarters, and on one of his legs as well. One needs stitches. I imagine an antibiotic would prevent complications from the hooves as well, if you got Doc Carr on the phone.”

She made a face. “He’s on another large-animal call. I left my cell phone number for him.”

“Your daughter knows very little about horses,” he began. “An animal that’s been abused is dangerous even for an experienced equestrian.”

“I know. But she was so upset,” came the soft reply. “She’s lost so much. . . .”

“She can learn how to take care of him,” Parker interrupted, because he understood without being told.

“Yes, and I can teach her. But it’s going to take time. I’m in a new teaching job. I’m not used to grammar school children. I taught at college level. . . .”

“We have a community college,” he pointed out.

She gave him a long-suffering look. “Yes, I’m on the waiting list for an opening, but I couldn’t wait. There are bills.”

“I know about bills.”

“So I got the only job available.”

“You aren’t from here,” he said.

She nodded. “My husband’s mother was from here. She was a Cowling, from the Dean River area.”

“I know some Cowlings. Good people.”

“She and my husband’s father had a ranch in Montana where they were living when my husband was born. After her husband died, she came back here to live, on the family’s ranch. She ran it herself until her death early this year. She left my husband the ranch. He was going to sell it, but he was . . . he . . . anyway. It took us some time to get moved here.”

“It’s a good place to raise a child,” he said, and he smiled gently at Teddie.

“She’s going on thirty,” Katy said, tongue-in-cheek, as she glanced at her daughter.

He chuckled. “Some mature faster than others.”

“We need to get Bartholomew home,” Katy said, and she was staring at the horse as if she wondered how exactly they were going to do that.

“Give me a second to get Wings and I’ll be right back.” He didn’t explain. He just went around the side of the house.

“Honestly, Teddie,” Katy began, exasperated.

“I’m sorry. Really. But he ran away!”

“I know. But still . . .”

“Next time, I’ll come get you first. I will.” Her eyes pleaded with her mother’s.

Katy gave in with a sigh. “All right. But don’t let it happen again.”

“I won’t. Poor old horse,” she added, looking at the palomino. “Mr. Parker said that he’s been abused.”

“He seems to know a lot about horses,” Katy agreed, just as Parker came around the house leading a white mare.

“What a beauty,” Katy exclaimed involuntarily.

“Wings,” he said. “She’s mine. Two years old and my best girl,” he added with a smile.

The horse had a halter and bridle, but no saddle.

Before they could ask what he meant to do, Parker took the oats gently away from the palomino and put them beside the road. He caught the horse’s bridle, led it to the mare, and vaulted onto the filly’s back as if he had wings himself.

“Okay,” he said. “Lead on.”

They laughed. He made something complicated so simple. Teddie and Katy piled into their vehicle and led the way home, with Parker bringing up the rear riding one horse and leading the other. Both went with him as easily as lambs following a shepherd.

* * *

The house was in bad shape, he noticed as he stopped at the front porch and tied Wings’s bridle to it. He patted her gently.

“Just stay right there, sweetheart. Won’t be a minute,” he said in a soft, deep tone, running his fingers along her neck. She looked at him and whinnied.

He went to get the palomino’s bridle and led him, along with the woman and the girl, to the ramshackle barn.

He made a face when he saw it, along with the broken fence where the animal had broken through.

“I know. We’re living in absolutely primitive conditions.” Katy laughed. “But at least Teddie and I have each other, if we have nothing else.” She said it with affection, but she didn’t touch her daughter.

“Yes, we do,” Teddie told her mother. “Thanks for not yelling.”

“You never teach a child anything by yelling,” Katy said softly. “Or by hitting.”

Parker glanced at her and saw things she didn’t realize. He put the palomino in a stall in the stable and closed the gate.

“We have to lock it,” Katy said. She drew a chain around the metal gate and hitched it to the post with a metal lock. “He’s an escape artist,” she added. “Which is how he happened to be hightailing it past your place. I guess he learned to run away when his owner started brutalizing him with that whip.”

“I’d love to have five minutes with that gentleman, and the whip,” Parker murmured as he looked around the barn. “This place is in bad shape,” he remarked.

“One step at a time,” she said with quiet dignity.

He turned and looked down at her and smiled. He almost never smiled, but she made him feel like he had as a boy when he got his first horse, when he dived into deep water for the first time, when he tracked his first deer. It was a feeling of extreme exhilaration that lifted him out of his routine. And shocked him.

She laughed. “It’s what my mother always said,” she explained. “Especially when Dad got sick and had to go to the hospital. He had a bad heart. She knew it when they married. He had two open-heart surgeries to put in an artificial valve, and he had a host of other health problems,” she added, not mentioning the worst of those, alcoholism. “They’d been married for twenty-five years when he died in a car crash. She said she got through life by living just for the day she was in, never looking ahead. It’s not a bad philosophy.”

“Not bad at all,” Teddie agreed.

“Is this his saddle?” Parker asked suddenly, noting the worn but serviceable saddle resting on a nearby gate. The stable was empty except for the palomino, tack on the walls, and some hay in square bales in a corner.

“Yes,” Katy said. “It was my grandfather’s. I’ve had it for years. I brought it with us when we moved. It’s been a lot of places with me, since my teens.” She joined him and ran her hand over the worn, smooth pommel. “Granddaddy competed in bulldogging for many years with a partner, his first cousin, up in Montana. He was very good. But he lost a thumb to a too-tight rope and ended up keeping books for my husband’s father. They lived near Dan’s folks in Montana, but they had a relative who owned the ranch here. When Dan’s father died, his mother sold the Montana ranch and moved back here, to her family ranch. Dan inherited it.” Her expression was wistful. “His grandfather, who founded the ranch, raised some of the finest Red Brangus around,” she added. “He was active in the local cattleman’s association as well. So was Dan’s mother.”

“My boss is, too. He and the Mrs. are pregnant with their first child. She writes for Warriors and Warlocks, that hit drama on cable TV.”

“Oh, my gosh!” Katy exclaimed. “It’s my favorite show! And she actually writes for it?! And lives here?”

“Her husband’s got a private jet,” he explained with twinkling eyes. “He has the pilot fly her to and from Manhattan for meetings with the other writers and the show’s director and producer.”

“That must be nice,” Katy said.

“Mom won’t let me watch that show,” Teddie said with a faint pout.

“When you’re older,” Katy told her.

“You always say that, about everything,” the little girl complained.

“Wait until you’re grown and you have kids,” Katy teased. “You’ll understand it a whole lot better.”

“This place needs a lot of work,” Parker said when they were back outside again. “Especially that fence, and those steps.” He indicated a board missing in the front ones.

“It really does,” Katy agreed. “We’re trying to take it one thing at a time.”

“Fence first, steps second. Got any tools? How about extra boards for the fence, or at least wire?”

Katy was shocked, but only for a minute. She went inside and came back out with a toolbox. “It was my husband’s, but I have no idea what’s in it,” she apologized.

“No problem. Boards? Wire?”

“I think there’s a bale of wire out in the big shed behind the house,” she returned.

“Yes, that big one there,” Teddie said, indicating a metal building that had seen better days.

“My mother-in-law used it mostly for storage,” Katy explained. “She kept some of the Red Brangus, just the breeding stock, and hired a man to manage it for her. He still works for us. . . .”

“Yes, that would be Jerry Miller,” he said, smiling. “I know him. Honest as the day is long, and a hard worker.”

“He has two full-time cowboys and four part-time ones.” She shook her head. “It takes so many people to work cattle. We’ll have our first sale in the spring. I’m hoping we’ll do well at it. I’ve forgotten most of what I know about ranching. But that’s what we have Jerry for,” she added with a smile. And it was just plain good luck that the last cattle sale had left her with a windfall that took care of all the salaries. Wintering the cows and heifers, and their few bulls, would be expensive, due to loss of forage from all the flooding in the West and Midwest, but she knew they’d manage somehow. They always did.

“At least we got the plumbing repaired and a new roof put on,” she said, waving her hand to indicate some rough idea of where the work had been done.

“Expensive stuff,” he commented, looking through the toolbox.

“Tell me about it,” she said, tongue-in-cheek.

He took out a hammer. “Nails?” he asked as he got to his feet gracefully.

“Nails. Right.” She looked around the building until her eyes came to a workbench. “I think he kept them in a coffee can over here.”

She produced it. There was a supply of assorted nails. He picked out some to do the job. He got wire cutters from the tool kit and proceeded to heft the heavy bale of wire over his shoulder.

“Can I help?” Teddie asked.

He chuckled. “Sure. You can carry the hammer and nails.”

She took them from him and followed along behind him to the pasture that fronted the stable.

“I could find someone to do it. . . .” Katy began.

“Not before the horse went through it again.” He frowned and glanced at them as he put down the wire and pulled out a measuring tape. “Why did he run?” he asked belatedly.

Teddie sighed. “Well, there was this plastic bag that had been on the porch. The wind came up and sent it flying toward the corral. Bartholomew panicked.”